In the video, they talked about that.
Ideally, UBI would replace welfare and only give like ~$12K to people (depending on location) to cover the most basic types of living expenses.
But yeah, it does give more control in the hands of the government. So if you’re against that then yeah totally I see why people would be against it.
Well, now I’m all sad.
Hacking. Machinists, mechanists, architects. Etc.
Jobs in which you need judgement.
No, that’s the thing. The state is going to have a similar amount of control in any system. The difference is, UBI is way easier to exploit for multinationals than welfare is. They cut out the middle man of keeping people poor and dependent, and mainline it themselves. They’ll still regulatory capture it like they did welfare in the 20’th century, but in the meantime it’s a free for all. so short term = worse, long term = cyberpunk dystopia
also, there’s no real evidence it would be good for people. The study cited by every positive take is on a limited scope, has a flawed methodology, and is paid for by people that like keeping not just the middle class poor, but entire developing nations poor, at the behest of the same machine that earmarked welfare to oblivion and helps consolidate the growing divide in wealth inequality.
You mean something like this?
Also living in the world of Deus Ex might be fun.
For as long as insurance companies that offer car insurance to people and fix the cars that get wrecked with junkyard parts. There will be a need for actual people.
Yes. Robots do help with the first assembly of the vehicle but that is the manufacturing process. Repair has to have a human touch. Having a robot that has limited articulation strip paint down to a bare metal would not work. Due to the more aerodynamic designs of vehicles now.
Wage theft is one of the many issues with the model, yeah, but it opens up other avenues, like subsidies for exclusivity, pure UBI status discrimination, having a known benchmark for price gouging, crowding out small businesses and nonprofits via those subsidies at scale, etc.
And that’s all without regulatory capture. As soon as you involve lobbyists, you get breaks for offering those subsidies, you get oofficially sanctioned service lock-ins, you get the erosion of basic public infrastructure in exchange for small ubi increases, you get erosion of worker rights with the strong argument of “why pay a minimum wage when we have to pay their UBI,” and you get all the potential for meddling welfare had after the new deal.
It’s a wet dream for the neoliberal machine that ends in global corporations having more influence than any other single entity in our society.
ugh
I hate how cyberpunk was popularized. In modern pop culture people sugar coat the important “technology isn’t inherently good” and “transhumanism is actually pretty terrifying and bad” bits and skip straight to “HEY COOL! ROBOT ARMS AND NEON!”
Sounds like the root of it all is that corporations are fucking us all over a barrel all the time.
You are thinking small there will be no need for 90% of the workforce but people will continue breeding with no purpose. What do you do with said people?
I have a modest proposal for you that may change your mind about the population problem
I mean, there are other systemic issues in american society that are just as bad, and the issue is our government or the way we treat people according to our cultural values, but UBI is an invention of multinational (particularly silicon valley) companies to further their agenda, marketed as good for the public.
Think about all the anti title-II messaging, or the general mills food pyramid if you want some past examples with the same tactics. This is just on a larger scale.
Grimes, I don’t feel so good…
Be an artist till them idiots think AI makes more significant art for the era.
Even UBI wouldn’t solve listless people issue. Research has shown that machines are better at project management than humans so even the power brokers don’t have much of a use either.
Extinction via atrophy…
people don’t actually work less if they have government assistance, that conception comes from 20th century propoganda funded by such illustrious organizations as the klan.
you’re ignoring the cultural component. automated checkout systems might keep track of money a lot better than humans, but if people don’t want to use them, they won’t use them. It’s part of the reason the SF futurists are trying to train people to accept automation.
They know that no matter how efficient their product is, it will only have applications in areas that don’t touch the average person’s day to day given the current culture.
I am not talking in our life time. I don’t care government or corporate hand outs. Cooperations will become defuct as less and less people are there. Once a company goes completely lights out is it still a company or just a machine? Would the same apply to Governments?
If machines can provide everything a human may want or desire and replace human contact with simulations we would eventually stop breeding and not even notice.
We are building our own extinction.
I don’t really take that view. The costs of maintaining and building automation grow exponentially with the scope and scale, and the media slaps the term “ai” on anything remotely related to robotics or informatics. The realities of the research and economics involved don’t really line up. Even now, our most advanced ML techniques are inefficient in the compute and time domains, and can only solve single optimization problems.
Not only that, but the most efficient kinds of automation are the implementation with little to no compute power, and no need to maintain network infrastructure to use. Even sweatshop factory work is heavily mechanized nowadays except in very low value industries.
At some point, the automation becomes automated. Learning and exploration does as well. We can argue about how long that takes but eventually human beings have a shortage of opportunities to create value (jobs), at which point no one has capital to pay for automated products/services and things fall apart (although maybe consumption also becomes automated? Idk, interesting tangent there maybe).
UBI seems like the least invasive way to have ubiquitous automation while sustaining an economy that all human beings can participate in.
That said, I agree that there is enormous potential for exploitation. I just can’t see a better alternative.
I definitely think the utopian vision of UBI where we all retire to write folk songs and make trinkets while robot servants spoon-feed us lab-grown meat is utterly misguided. Most people will need structured activity of some sort, and where strife doesn’t exist, we will find ways to create it for ourselves out of boredom.
